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On Tuesday, August 4th, Neflix announced on their blog that they would begin offering new parents a progressive parental leave policy:
...Today we're introducing an unlimited leave policy for new moms and dads that allows them to take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child's birth or adoption.
The Boston Globe picked up the story earlier today and compared Netflix's new policy to Google's, which offers 18 weeks of paid maternity leave and 12 weeks of "baby bonding" time. The Boston Globe also notes:
The US and Papua New Guinea are the only countries among 185 nations and territories that hadn't imposed government-mandated laws requiring employers to pay mothers while on leave with their babies, according to a study released last year by the United Nations' International Labor Organization.
This new policy "covers all of the roughly 2,000 people working at [Netflix's] Internet video and DVD-by-mail services, according to the Los Gatos, California, company."
However, not all media voices are pleased with this change. Suzanne Venker, author of the recent book The Two-Income Trap: Why Parents Are Choosing To Stay Home, writes for Time :
Offering new parents full pay for up to one year is akin to putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. The needs of children are huge, and they do not end at one year. On the contrary, they just begin. Taking a year off of work to meet those needs merely scratches the surface.
What does Soylent think? Should companies offer new parents lengthy paid leave after they bring a new bundle of joy into the world, or do generous policies do more harm than good?
(Score: 1) by Francis on Thursday August 06 2015, @06:48PM
That doesn't really work out so well. There are no rent controls in most markets and developers aim for the top income earners leaving everybody else to fend for themselves over a dwindling number of units. The only places where that isn't happening tend to be places that are dieing. No jobs or poor quality jobs and people not wanting to move there. Think places like Detroit where there's few people moving in and people who have a chance elsewhere are taking it.
Around here, moving out of the city limits introduces a gap. I can get a bus pass for about $100 a month for most of my transportation or I can be paying $400 or more for the cost of owning a car. If I move out of the city limits, I would have to own a car, which means that the savings that I'd have by moving would largely evaporate. And as more and more people are priced out of the local market they have to move somewhere, and you wind up having to move further and further away in order to make it affordable.
What really needs to happen is that there needs to be some rent control enacted. There's a vicious cycle where landlords raise their rents and then find people willing to pay, so they raise invest in things that will further increase the amount they can ask the few people remaining to pay. Without some form of rent control, you see that go and go until only the well off can afford to pay and everybody else has to live far away. Around here, we've had decades of people from California moving in and paying too much money for real estate driving the prices up. Many of the apartments that existed when I was a child are now condos and there's more interest in building condos than in building apartments.
It just makes for a shit situation. And this is becoming the norm in places that actually have a growing economy and jobs.